A Brilliant Film About the Women Who Saved Liberia

The new documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell tells the story of the women who fought for peace—and won—in war-ravaged Liberia.

“I’m going to make a feminist man out of him!” Leymah Gbowee is gushing about her youngest son to a crowd of professors, filmmakers, and socialites inside the intimate ballroom of Manhattan’s Hotel Plaza Athenee. The crowd, a soup of black, beige, and cream fabric, has been silenced by clinking glasses and is now hanging on Leymah’s every word. In a vermillion fishtail gown and a bright green headdress almost a foot high, she commands the room—Queen for the day. “When I left home all that time,” she says, “my kids just told their friends, ‘My mom is a peace activist,’ and that was that. But then we did a private screening of the film in Ghana, and my kids came, and afterwards they told me, ‘If we knew you did such dangerous work, we would have told you to stop!’”

The film she speaks of is the new documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, and Leymah is the star, though it is an understatement to couch it in those terms. Back in 2003, Leymah did not wear brilliant peacock garments, but only stark white, a part of her uniform as a fighter for peace in civil war-ravaged Liberia. By that time, the warlord-backed rebels (LURD) had launched a full-scale attack against Monrovia and Liberia’s villages, raping and pillaging along the way.

When Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa’s first female prime minister, was elected in Liberia’s first democratic vote in 2005, Lehmah says, “that was just the icing.”

Leymah had a vision of peace, and one day, she decided to gather friends (both Muslim and Christian) and sit in a field near the central Monrovia fish market, clad in white, to demand an end to the fighting. The few turned to hundreds and into a real organization—Women in Peacebuilding Program, or WIPP. The sit-in turned into meetings with the president and leaders of LURD, leading to the 2003 peace talks in Ghana. During the peace talks, when the two sides hadn’t come to a decision after months, Leymah and her troops blocked the building exits in Accra until accords had been made. It was nonviolent resistance, and completely feminine in its nature (done by word of mouth and through clothing and coded signals rather than loud acts), but Leymah and her army did more to bring peace to Liberia than almost any other group. When Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first female prime minister in Africa, was elected in Liberia’s first democratic vote in 2005, Leymah says, “That was just the icing.”

As is the case with many women’s movements, the story of WIPP could have been lost forever. By the time Abby Disney (yes, Roy’s daughter) arrived in Liberia in 2006, she heard only whispers of Leymah and the women in white, and there was no known footage of their fish market protests. But Abby, who had until then decided to stay away from the family filmmaking legacy, decided she had to document WIPP’s actions, if for no other reason than to show women in other parts of the world that they can affect change. Along with director Gini Reticker, Abby and Leymah made the film, and this year, it won raves at the Tribeca Film Festival and has won celebrity adoration from Rosie O’Donnell, Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler, and Gloria Steinem, who hosted Leymah’s most recent dinner appearance.

“In December,” Leymah said to the crowd, “we will host the first ever Women’s Policy Forum in Africa—women from the Sudan, Congo, Zimbabwe, everywhere will be invited. They will see … once the willpower is generated, the external strength just comes.”